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Thwarted Desire for the Other Place/Time?  

            As any Hungarian of middle age—and some of a much younger age—can tell you, Hungary had a glorious past.  The migration to the Carpathian Basin and conversion to Christianity, the powerful years as junior partner in the Hapsburg Empire, first underground on the Continent, one of the first European capitals with electric street lights…these are the facts and the folklore that still bring a certain degree of pride to Hungarians.  But those who hold this history close to their hearts are perhaps dying out like the mother in Makk Károly’s Love.  The more abstract nostalgia for a Central-Eastern European culture is perhaps stronger.  There is also a strong drive to “catch up” to the rest of Europe, as can be seen in the ambitions to join the EU.  This desire is tempered by a certain degree of ambivalence.  The hope and faith in the future has not entirely replaced an eye on the past.  

For the West, the liberation of the Warsaw Pact Countries may have appeared to be the crowning achievement at the end of the 20^th Century, but in practical terms for the region, it was much more than a symbolic victory over communism.  Just when the work began in earnest, the West lost interest.  The love affair, in many ways, was over.  But then, just when Central-Eastern Europe’s popularity was waning, the West decided to come courting again.  This time it was an offer of something akin to partnership.  From a Western political perspective, to be included with the likes of Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom as the “new Europe” in a vague war on terror and a very concrete war in Iraq may have seemed terribly flattering to the small Central-Eastern European nations, but the reality is much more stark and certainly a bit less appealing.  The only choices were to be part of the “new” (progress) or the “old” (ineffectual, unimportant, and fully lacking in status).  In the new world that the United States is in the process of nearly unilaterally developing, there is little place for an introspective critical nostalgia (what Boym calls “off-Modern” [1] ), nor for a critique or examination of the concept of progress.  There is also clearly little space or time in politics for the development of alternative ideas as to what the future may hold.

But the artist’s imagined worlds continue to grow and continue to pit nostalgia against modernity (or a definitive view of the present and future).  Esterházy Péter has recently published a new book that is a post-modern reconstruction of his family’s long history, tracing the path from its past nobility to his present day celebrity.  In the 1990’s he rejected the possibility of his family reclaiming estates that were collectivized under communism, thereby turning away from a personal realization of Boym’s Restorative Nostalgia.  Tímar Péter’s follow-up work to Csinibaba was 6:3, again an ironic revisit to history when a relative of a famous footballer travels back to the day of Hungary’s historic defeat of England in soccer.  Sziget continues to be a strong cultural force and the anchor of a vibrant youth movement by producing a mutant mix of domestic and international arts.  Nostalgia may never have the overt strength to overshadow the current age’s cult of the modern, but it certainly lives in the minds of those who will forever be looking for the third way, the alternate path that never was and may never be.